If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him

We middle-class white hipsters callously romanticized the Negro, just as the Marxists had distortedly ennobled the workingman. It goes on and on. Later generations of young pilgrims have cruelly used their own chosen noble savages. The Beats went on the road, glorifying the lot of the homeless without compassion. The Hippies took on voluntary pover

As the [Hasidic] saying goes, a man must have two pockets into which he can reach at one time or another according to his needs. In his right pocket he must keep the words: “For my sake was the world created.” And in his left: “I am dust and ashes.”3

I try to be guided by Carl Whitaker’s advice to feed the patient not when he is crying that he is hungry, but only when I feel the milk overflowing from my own nipples.

But he finds, as we all do, that you can’t make anyone love you. You just have to reveal who you are and take your chances. Oh, sure, you can give a pleasing impression to others, flatter and appease them. Or, you can intimidate other people, threaten and menace them. But whether by cajoling or by coercing, you cannot elicit a gift of love.

To some extent, each of us marries to make up for his own deficiencies. As a child, no one can stand alone against his family and the community, and in all but the most extreme instances, he is in no position to leave and to set up a life elsewhere. In order to survive as children, we have all had to exaggerate those aspects of ourselves that pleas

The living waters draw me back to their shores again and again. They seem to wish to show me that though they are ever changing, yet they never change. The ocean is both endlessly calm and disruptively turbulent, alternately quieting my own inner turmoil, while yet insistently warning me of the dark powers that lie unquiet beneath the water’s surfa

If he will let himself get deeply into the experience of being stuck, only then will he reclaim that part of himself that is holding him. Only if he will give up trying to control his thinking, and let himself sink into his confusion, only then will things become clear.

There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell.12 He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room’s only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so

The pilgrim, whether psychotherapy patient or earlier wayfarer, is at war with himself, in a struggle with his own nature. All of the truly important battles are waged within the self. It is as if we are all tempted to view ourselves as men on horseback.9 The horse represents a lusty animal-way of living, untrammeled by reason, unguided by purpose.